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Hey there, back again, … , and it only took me two months this time!! I know I still have been missing in action the last couple of months, and I must admit I haven’t done much photography-wise either. Certainly nothing that I felt was worth sharing here, on the blog.

Anyway, for today’s post I wanted to share a picture of our beloved yogiman who has been living with us in our home since the day we moved in. He has had different locations across our living-room, but nowadays he’s sitting in a niche inside a closet. That is why the light is being blocked from above him. I took this shot using on-camera flash (ttl), but I bounced the light from my flash over my shoulder onto the ceiling behind me. Additionally, I was blocking some of the light myself, as I was standing in front of the niche. Doing so resulted in this image with the most gorgeous and dramatic light.

I immediatly loved what I saw on my camera’s lcd so I went straight to my computer to finish the image. First I loaded the raw-file into darktable. For those who aren’t familiar with darktable: it is basically a photo-workflow application for linux (much like Adobe’s Lightroom is for Windows or Mac, I might write a post about it sometime). That’s right, I use Linux. I do almost exclusively on my home computer since 2007 (99.5% of the time, 0.5% windows: when I really need an application that isn’t available on linux and a good alternative is missing). I didn’t have to do much to this image though. It is literally just a square crop, a slight change of white balance, and some added contrast using the curves-tool.

But wait, what’s the instagram-like border and all??? Well, that’s exactly it: it’s instagram. I recently started playing with instagram since it launched for android a week or two ago (you can find me as ‘sebasb37’ on there if you wish to follow me). Although it is ment for spicing up the snapshots one takes with his phone, the square crop of the image made me think: what if I load this file onto my tablet and throw it into instagram?? So, I did and went through the available filters. Most of them were just bleh, or meh, … , and just ruined the image, but the ‘lo-fi’ filter made me go: “Oh, wow!”. I was pretty pleased with my image already, but it made it even better (in my opinion anyway). So that’s basically it, simple and easy! I probably can get the same result using different layers, masks, and other wizardry in ‘the Gimp” (or Adobe’s Photoshop), but I like simple :-). I will try to recreate it though, since instagram ate all my resolution :-(. I simply cannot make a decent print of it anymore, so in case I want a print of it, I will have to do some Gimp-magic.

Well, that’s it for today’s post. Hope you’ve enjoyed it and see you all next time!!